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Monthly Archives: September 2003

I seem to have fallen into a groove of only posting news updates once a month so I guess it’s about time to sum up the exciting events of September. Let’s see…

Susan and I went to the Joan Mitchell exhibit at “The Modern“, the new
Ft. Worth museum. Mitchell is by no means my favorite artist but it was very interesting that you could look at what appeared to be just a big Jackson-Pollock-like mess of colors on a white background and get the impression of a city or snow-covered trees and then find out 1) that the other people standing around got the same impression and 2) that the fine print on the plaque describing the painting confirmed your impression and she had actually painted what you thought she’d painted. You can find a few samples on Google Image Search.

We also made an early visit to the State Fair of Texas. We usually don’t make it until October but managed to get there on Monday, Sep 29th this year. I think that’s a first for us. And going on a week day is always considerably less crowded than weekends. All the usual things were seen and done. Eating corn dogs and tornado potatoes, checking out all the new concept cars in the automotive exhibits, watching the bizarre variety of farm animals being prepped for contests, the weird craft exhibits. One of the high points this year has to be the very nice rendition of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) created from a toilet seat and assorted plubming components. A few things were missing this year though; no butter sculpture, no shooting Bin Laden with a paintball gun contest. And while we didn’t take in the Birds of the World show this year we did check out the nifty Texas Garden Railway that was added to the Texas Discovery Garden Center.

Otherwise, most of my time seems to have been spent on work-related things. I didn’t manage to get some time in working on robots.net and the robotics category reorganization project at ODP. The data dumps from ODP have started showing UTF-8 errors again but there’s a good chance the source of the errors has been found and will be fixed soon. Meanwhile, the webcam situation at the DPRG lab is improving. We’ve run a camserv relay live at the last couple of RBNOs with good results. Hopefully we’ll have the second camera online soon.